A couple of quotes to stand out (of which there are many) :

“When you forgive you love. When you love God shines his light on you”.

“Happiness is only real when shared”.

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I Go Back to May 1937 (from The Gold Cell) by Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch,
the red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head,
I see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her,
its sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb,
all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live.
I take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

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It’s becoming quite common for me, when experiencing what seems to be a cold, to find words morphing or sentences shifting to take on different meaning. So how apt I thought, when I read “Most of my friends are Starlight”. Coinciding at a time when I’m learning to see people as their true selves. We may be carbon based life forms but do we see our hidden Starlight?

Picture the scene: You’re dead at last but you wish to make contact with the mortals you remember here on Earth. The medium is on the platform and has noticed your presence, and there in the audience are the people you wish to communicate with. What exactly do you say, bearing in mind we’re not able to talk directly to them as we once did?
So I pipe up “it’s Chris”. Now due to the fact time doesn’t exist as such when you’re dead, it has passed your attention that several years have passed since you snuffed it and they actually know a couple of people both living and dead with the same name. It’s also fair to assume that a specific name might not be conveyed clearly as mostly thoughts with images are used.

So how able are you to describe your identity by using imagery?

…the reason for so many flourishing then failed relationships. But do we ever see a pattern which might suggest an opportunity to learn from our experience. What if, for a moment, we consider every person we’ve ever met and look for something in them which reflects us. By this I mean; have you ever blamed someone, judged someone or felt fearful because of who they are? Look at the relationship you have with yourself and question if the same feelings reside within you – would you react in the same way if confronted with yourself? Is it true that what we reject in others is what we are unable to see in ourselves?

To go further into the shadowy murk. Is there one person we hate so much and maybe once loved but now think so evil we cannot even utter their name? O.K, Perhaps not this severe, but who are we rejecting, them, or the self-hatred we deny is within us? Are they literally your opposite in everything they do or say? Look to see if they possess something, a quality, an ability you long for? What do they allow themselves you don’t? What are they free of that you are trapped by?
Once recognised, we often discover our deepest desires or greatest losses and by recognising this, we can begin to heal ourselves.

Inspired by my understandings having read this book:
LOVE YOURSELF… & IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU MARRY
by Eva-Maria Zurhorst

Looking beyond the considered reality of most. How perfectly does this fit with the belief that we are the creators of all that is.
You can either believe that this is real, with individual people swirling around yourself and by your thoughts alone, we are pushed and pulled like forces on a magnet to match our desires and beliefs.
Perhaps we can step from one reality to another. Not so much changing what we perceive but shifting from one time and space to another, which has a slightly different storyline.
Or more radically. We are the only tangible thing in this world. Even this body is likely to have been imaged by us. Indeed, this is not only a more radical concept but it also adds the question, can we really hurt another?